Pills are made in a broad variety of sizes and shapes for purpose of identification. The term “pills” is used herein to incorporate tablets, capsules, caplets and gel caps. The size variety of pills also accommodates different drug dosage requirements. While this system is clearly functional for its intended purpose, the variety in size and shape necessitates conventional equipment for packaging pills to be modified in some way to accurately handle, count and package different pills. The modification typically involves either replacing certain parts in a packing machine or adjusting the spacing of parts to be able to linearly feed, separate, count and package the required pills.
When a pharmaceutical manufacturer makes pills for commercial distribution, the batch production quantity is normally fairly large and the machine adjustments described are considered to be absorbed by a long production cycle. However, when a secondary packager, also known as a contract packager, or a pharmacy or hospital, needs to package pills, the requirements are often different. One such scenario may be packaging pills in a unit pack for individual doses. In these small quantity packaging situations and where the size or shape pill being packaged changes relatively frequently, changing machine parts or adjusting machine part spacing is relatively onerous and time consuming. Thus a need exists for pill packing equipment, particularly equipment for feeding pills to a packaging machine that can handle many different sizes and shapes of pill without a need for machine part changing or adjusting.